Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Nursie

>> I don't understand - why would cheap/free drugs prevent gun battles

No profit to fight over

>> car break ins

No need to find hundreds of dollars a day to support the habit

>> or OD'ing?

Known quantities of known substances can help people avoid OD from either the wrong thing (fentanyl lately) or unexpected purity.

>> As far as I'm aware, junkies still need money to eat/sleep/drink and very few have a reliable source of income.

You only need a few bucks a day to eat/sleep/drink, you need potentially hundreds for your habit at present. Given an easy, cheap supply many will be able to hold down a regular job.

>> All gun battles aren't over drugs, and would still occur.

But the ones over drug money would stop, drugs are a major source of gang funding.

>> And not all overdoses are caused by tainted drugs.

No, but a hell of a lot are.

View on HN

That's a strange argument. Alcohol is a drug sold in the open pretty much everywhere.

You still see plenty alcoholists unable to keep a job, stealing things, fighting and even dying from their habit. It's almost as if easily accessible drugs doesn't fix the underlying problem here.

But alcohol addiction of itself is not a crime.

Sure: being drunk in various contexts may be, and can be a serious crime (drink driving, certain commercial operators expecially). But being in possession of alcohol, drinking it in your home, sharing it with friends (provided above legal age and not driving): not a crime.

You've got the fundamental problem of addiction, for those who are addicted (many are, many are not). But you aren't layering on the additional crime of criminalisation.

Alcohol is addictive and toxic. Yes, we do have alcoholics all over the place. Few are dead.or dying because of methanol poisoning, and few need to steal hundreds of dollars a day for a fix.

It's not really a very strange argument, particularly when it comes to opiates - it's a pretty well evidenced argument. Those with access to cheap or free maintenance doses have a better recovery rate, and a better rate of being able to re-enter prodictive society.

people gamble their money away and its plenty legal. The free market won't solve everything.

I also have a bit of a hard time imagining that someone having even easier access to, say, meth will thus be able to hold onto a job more easily. Personally I can't show up drunk to work.

Though I agree with things like gang violence, I do worry about the effects on public health. Cigarettes and alcohol mess up society a lot already

I'm not claiming it's going to be 100% solution, only that it would be much better, and cut out some of the profit motives at the gang level, and need for vast amounts of cash at the addict level.

>> I also have a bit of a hard time imagining that someone having even easier access to, say, meth will thus be able to hold onto a job more easily. Personally I can't show up drunk to work

Me neither. And I honestly don't know how this stuff might apply to a substance like meth.

I know that studies tend to show that when opiate addicts are given easy and cheap/free access to maintenance doses and counselling, they have a much easier time returning to something like a normal life, and many can hold down jobs while either continuing the maintenance indefinitely or slowly tapering. The constant search for money and the insecurity about the next dose both make the effects of the addiction on their lives much, much worse. And it's not like heroin is all that expensive to make.

This isn't, as I said above, necessarily an argument for a totally free market in heroin, but it is to show that a different approach may reduce the harm to the individual and reduce the harm done to society by both those individuals and the black market profit-making organisation above them. Not to mention the hell that gets rained on producer-countries.

>> Cigarettes and alcohol mess up society a lot already

Objectively, scientifically, these are two of the worst and most harmful drugs we know of.

That's great but the original comment implied that all of the above would stop. My comment refuted it, your comment is agreeing - in that it wouldn't stop it but may reduce it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com